Electrical interconnects and package substrates experience challenges as the feature sizes and line spacing are reduced to achieve further miniaturization and increased circuit density. The use of laser ablation has become increasingly used to create the via structures for fine line or fine pitch structures. The use of lasers allows localized structure creation, where the processed circuits are plated together to create via connections from one layer to another. As density increases, however, laser processed via structures can experience significant taper, carbon contamination, layer-to-layer shorting during the plating process due to registration issues, and high resistance interconnections that may be prone to result in reliability issues. The challenge of making fine line PCBs often relates to the difficulty in creating very small or blind and buried vias.
The process used by current technology is based upon a dry film process, where a substrate of some sort has a copper layer as the base circuit layer onto which a dry film is applied. The dry film is then patterned with a laser to create the circuit patterns. The next copper layer is added and etched as appropriate, with the laser used to drill through the film to expose the previous copper layer so a via can be plated to join the circuit layers. This process is typically used for semiconductor package substrates and larger format circuit boards, such as used in a cell phone. For larger format circuit boards, the dry film technology is used to build fine line circuits on top of base circuit board made with conventional low density lamination techniques.
In both cases, the package substrate and the larger format circuit board build up are very expensive compared to traditional low density laminate technology, and suffer from several limitations inherent to the process. For example, in the case where a low density laminate base is used as the starting point for subsequent high density layers are built up, the cost increases dramatically since the entire surface of the lower density base board must be processed with the build up process across the entire area, not just in the areas where the high density is required.
Another limitation is the reliability of the via structures joining one circuit layer to another, which tend to be a barrel plated structures with the side walls of the via plated and in many cases must be filled with a via fill material to eliminate an air pocket which may separate during solder reflow temperatures. The vias require drilling through the dry film to expose the previous circuit layer in order to create the via that connects the circuit layers. The dry film is applied as a solid contiguous sheet where the material on that particular layer is restricted to that particular material across the entire layer in the build up less the areas ablated to create the via target for joining the previous and subsequent circuit layers. That is, the dry layer film is homogeneous across the entire layer.